Overview
It's the first film from Andrea Arnold in almost a decade, since 2016's Cannes Jury Prize-winning American Honey. It boasts Barry Keoghan in his first big-screen role since Saltburn made him a megastar. ("He could pretty much have done anything he wanted and he stuck with my small, low-budget film, so that's pretty spectacular," Arnold tells Concrete Playground.) It gives Franz Rogowski another exceptional part for his ever-growing resume (see also: Victoria, Happy End, Transit, A Hidden Life, Undine, Great Freedom and Passages). It unearths a stellar new talent in British Independent Film Award Breakthrough Performance-nominee and first-time actor Nykiya Adams. It sports a soundtrack filled with British sing-alongs, complete with a nod to its most-famous face's film past worked in among Blur's 'The Universal', The Verve's 'Lucky Man' and Coldplay's 'Yellow'.
Bird is worth watching for each of these reasons alone — as well as for Arnold's blazing empathy, a hallmark of her work since her Oscar-winning short film days, and also the brilliant naturalism that always beams through in the cinematography by her regular collaborator Robbie Ryan (a two-time Academy Award-nominee for The Favourite and Poor Things). It's also a must-see for letting audiences discover how Arnold has spun a tender and moving coming-of-age fable that blends social realism with magical realism from a unique starting point: "it was an image of a naked tall man with a long penis standing on a tall building at night in the mist," she advises. "I think it's a metaphor."
Bird began the same way that Andrea Arnold's work always does: with a distinctive picture. While every film, be it a short, feature or documentary, trades in visuals, of course, the writer/director's creative process for each of her projects commences with an image that comes to her, and that she's then driven to unlock. Such was her kick-off point when she started penning a movie that now sits beside Red Road, Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights on her resume as well — plus episodes of Transparent and I Love Dick, the entire second season of Big Little Lies and heartbreaking doco Cow. Rogowski portrays the titular character, who is indeed sighted on a rooftop. Adams is Bailey, the movie's 12-year-old protagonist. Keoghan plays Bug, her single dad, who she resides with in a north Kent squat — also with her brother Hunter (fellow first-timer Jason Buda) — and whose new engagement shatters Bailey's status quo.
Arnold layers Bird with journeys and searches to belong. It's true for the girl at the feature's centre, who feels like the already-chaotic existence that she's living with Bug and Hunter is crumbling. It's accurate of Bird, the mysterious stranger on a quest that's tied to his past, too. Bug's impending nuptials, Hunter's own romantic situation: it applies to them also, as it frequently has to other characters across the helmer's filmography. Chatting with us in 2016, American Honey star Riley Keough described that picture as "like an experience, rather than like a film" and "really getting to that sort of place in people's souls"; again, that applies across every Arnold project.
In her Oscar-awarded short Wasp, Arnold's focus is a single mother trying to start a new relationship. Red Road follows a CCTV operator who spots someone that she knows on surveillance footage, Fish Tank charts the change in a 15-year-old's life when her mum begins seeing a new boyfriend, Wuthering Heights obviously adapts Emily Brontë's gothic great about Catherine and Heathcliff, and American Honey heads on a US road trip. A female dairy cow earns the filmmaker's attention in Cow. Each unfurls a different narrative, even if dysfunctional families and growing up are familiar themes. "None of the stories are directly connected, but I'm quite interested in those kind of families, I guess," Arnold notes. "Maybe because my own family was quite sort of chaotic as a child." Her work is linked by a sentiment that's summed up wonderfully in an unforgettable line in Bird, too: "no one's no one".
That piece of dialogue was pivotal for the director. Arnold is adamant about that fact, as she was about ensuring that the line made it into Bird. As she keeps demonstrating a devastatingly evocative and effective knack for seeing working-class reality with clear eyes while equally spying the world's beauty wherever her characters can snatch it, Arnold likes to let her films speak for themselves rather than unpacking their meaning — "I really believe in cinema being something that you give to the audience to have their own experience with," she says; "you want the audience to go to the bar afterwards and argue about what they think it meant, 'I think it meant this' or 'I think it meant that', 'no, no, what about that scene, because that scene means that'" — but she's aware of how crucial those four words are.
Bird's evolution from that first image of a man on a building, delving into magical realism, casting Keoghan, discovering Adams, guiding naturalistic performances out of her actors, her approach to the film's soundtrack, making three-dimensional movies about the working class: we also spoke with Arnold about all of the above.
On How Bird Evolved From Arnold's First Vision of a Man on a Rooftop in the Mist
"Every time I write, I have an image that I then treat like a puzzle. It's like a mystery. The image is a mystery. Who's the man? Why is he naked? Why is he in mist? Why is he standing on a building? Is someone looking at him? Is he an alien? How old is he? The image encourages me to ask lots of questions, so it becomes a puzzle that I then have to solve.
And usually what happens is, I know that if the image really keeps annoying me, like it keeps coming into my head, that it's something I need to explore. So I go off and I start making notes, and I start thinking about what are the answers to some of the questions, and that starts me thinking about scenes and possible other images and characters. And then I just build it from there, really.
Which takes years sometimes. Not like every day, but it doesn't always make sense straight away, and I start digging around and 'yeah, that makes sense' and 'that doesn't make sense'. I keep — I think I started Bird years ago, five years ago or something, but then I did Cow and did other things, and so I came back to it.
If I'd made it straight away five years ago, I think it would be a completely film to the one I made just now, actually. I think it would have been an interesting, different film. Because in five years, you change and you grow, and you do other things and your ideas change. So it depends on the kind of person I am at the time — and actually, interestingly I wasn't sure I should do it. Because I felt like somehow, the image, although I started with the image, that maybe I didn't need to really go there. But then I just kept going and did. And then I think some of the magical realism came out of that because I was pushing the idea more than I perhaps would have done. Maybe five years ago, there would have been no magical realism, but now there is."
On Bird's Flight Into Magical Realism
"It came naturally out of the process of writing. I didn't have any other films in mind. I love films like Pan's Labyrinth, for example. I think that's an amazing film, but it's not a film that I ever thought was anything like my films or anything to with me. When I saw that film, which I loved, I never thought 'oh, yeah, that I'm going to do that' or 'that's something to do with me' — I loved it for what it was, for its own creation. I never even thought about it.
When I started writing, it just started coming naturally — the storytelling, my imagination just went there. So I just let it. It was liberating. I thought 'well, it's a film, I can make anything happen'. It's like magic, isn't it? You can do what you like.
To me, it would seem like a natural progression from what I already do. Because I think, all the nature things I film, to me they're magical anyway. If you put a camera on something like a dragonfly, for example, that's about as alien and as magical as you can get.
If you look at anything that we, all these things we have naturally in our lives, that are around — look at a worm. What an amazing thing a worm is, right. If you want look at a worm, film a worm and study it, you'd be thinking 'wow, that's like an alien. That's a strange thing. Does it move? How does it work? How does it live?'.
I find all the things around us magical anyway. I literally find them fascinating. I find a snail, for example — you just have to look at those things and it's magical anyway. So to me, what I did just didn't seem so weird. It didn't seem so strange to me. It felt normal. It felt like an extension and natural progression of what I'd already done."
On the Importance of the "No One's No One" Line — and How It Also Echoes Across Arnold's Other Work
"That line just came while I was writing and I just thought 'oh god, that just sums up everything I care about. That just sums up absolutely everything'.
And I was absolutely adamant. Because sometimes when you're filming scenes — my scripts end up being quite layered, I think, and I lose so much from my scripts when we film, because filming is so clunky compared with when you do layers in a scene. I might layer a scene with all sorts of things, and of course you film it and sometimes it's like driving a tank across your scenes. It's hard to achieve some of the subtleties that I put in my in my script. Sometimes I think 'maybe I should just write, because then I can have all the things that I want in there'.
So often I'm improvising — or not, no I'm not improvising, I'm allowing things from the script, I let them go because I just have to, because the situation, the timing. Sometimes they have lots of non-actors, they don't remember a line or they don't always say it like it is. So often, the scene becomes sort of an echo of what I wrote, but not totally what I wrote. But that line, I was absolutely adamant that we didn't lose it. I was like 'it doesn't matter what'.
And we had to hurry in that situation, because we didn't have much time to film in the station and we had some other issues that day. So we ended up with very little time to film on the station and outside the station, but I was absolutely like 'we're putting the camera there and we're going to get that line, that's got to be there'.
It's my favourite line. And I think you're right, thank you for spotting that — it is something that I really care about and I think probably is across my work, and that is something I believe."
On Casting Barry Keoghan as Bug
"My casting comrade Lucy Pardee, who I work with — who's an amazing woman and who I've worked with for years — she knows me really well. She knows my worlds really well. She completely understands them. I've known her for many years. And she thinks about people she thinks will fit in my world.
She mentioned him very early on, like ages before Banshees came out. And I met him just before The Banshees of Inisherin came out. And I hadn't seen him very much, actually, but she sent me a picture of him and I was like 'wow, I love the way he looks' — and he looked like he could fit straight in.
Then I saw him in a couple of things, just small roles in things, and then I went to meet him. I don't always need to see them in another film necessarily. I like meeting people. And I'll always go on meeting. I feel like that's the genuine feeling that you get, from meeting a person. And I met him — he came down from Scotland when I was in London, and we had a meeting, and I just loved him the minute I met him. I think I offered it, we offered it, to him the next day.
But that was quite a long time before we started — but I never ever faltered. I don't think I met anyone else for Bug, actually. I think I just met him and I was like 'yeah, totally'. But that's thanks to Lucy because she just knows me so well, so she picks people that she knows what I'm going to respond to and who feel like they go in my world.
And then Banshees came out, of course, and I went to see it, and I just loved him in that. He was so fantastic in that. I was like 'yeah, we definitely made the right choice, without a doubt'. But I'd cast him before that came out so. And then, of course, he was in Saltburn. And then he went stratospheric.
I actually thought 'he's never going to stay with our film', because he could do anything he wants now. But he did. So that was beautiful. He stuck with us."
On Knowing That Adams, Who Only Auditioned to Get Out of a Class at School, Was the Film's Bailey
"The first audition was with Lucy, the casting director, and then Lucy took her along to another — when she saw her, she brought her along to meet me after. So when I met her, she just came on a Saturday. We do the auditions up near where everybody lives, so they don't have to travel very far. So we were up in the area, and she came on that Saturday. I think she'd been playing football that day. She does football and stuff. She's very physical, very sporty.
I think she did it to get out of a design and technology class, didn't she? I think that's the story. I think I heard her say that the other day — I didn't know that until I heard her say that. She did the audition more to get out of a lesson than she did because she wanted to be an actor. She just did it to get out of something.
So I think even, I don't know when she came to see me, I'm not sure that she was still that not sure about this thing. I think I remember her walking in like 'yeah, what is, what is this thing?'. But I remember waking up when I saw her. I felt like she had a presence. And that I really took note of, I kind of thought 'oh, this this kid has got a presence'.
It wasn't quite the sort of the kid that I'd written or been looking for, exactly. She was different. But I noted her and she woke me up, and I think you've got to pay attention to those feelings. That never left me, so she ended being the Bailey."
On Guiding Naturalistic Performances Out of Bird's Cast
"I shoot chronologically, which I think is a huge thing, and I particularly love it. I do that mostly for the people who haven't acted before, because I think it gives them some sense of where they are, and then they don't have to jump in and out of the chronology — they're not having to do a scene from the end and then a scene from the beginning. It gives them some sense of their journey.
Then, because I do that, I do that with all the actors as well, of course — and then I don't show them the whole script. I give them scenes bit by bit.
And then I think the actual day-to-day directing is, for me, every person I'm working with is an individual and your relationship then is an individual relationship — and different actors, different people who haven't acted before, need you or there's different ways in which you work with each of them. So there's not one way, I don't think, that I work with anybody.
But I try to have relationships with everybody with, and for that to be like a living, growing, evolving thing that is something that we do as we go along."
On the Use of British Anthems in the Soundtrack
"Every character, I make a playlist for. So that was on Bug's playlist, these sort of very blokey anthems. I mean, 'Yellow' is a song that I absolutely love anyway. I try, all the songs I use, I try, even though the character's songs, I still want them to be songs I love — and I usually don't pick any song that I don't love. Most songs in my films, I love. And even if they're particular character songs, I still want to love them. So I try to find songs that I love for every character.
So 'Yellow' is, I think, a fantastic song and. And 'The Universal' is a fantastic song. And 'Lucky Man'. They're all on Bug's playlist. Bug had that kind of playlist, sort of anthems, because I think he likes to sing and he likes to be loud, and he likes to sing these songs. He knows all the words.
Then I made playlists for everyone else. I made a playlist for Bailey, but her music got drowned out by Bug's — every time I tried to have a song that was Bailey's song, it didn't happen because she's in the house and Bug takes over.
So that happened naturally, actually. That wasn't an intention. I didn't mean for that to happen, but it did happen. And actually now, I realise it happened naturally because of the character and because of the way the world was. So that was something that was sort of a truth that happened, even though I planned something different — the truth came out.
And then what happened is because we had Burial do some of the soundtrack, and I've never worked with someone doing a soundtrack before, so this was a new experience for me — but his music became more like Bailey's internal world. So she had her own music, but it wasn't songs. It wasn't songs that she would have on a playlist. It was more her internal world."
On Making Three-Dimensional Films About the Working Class
"I grew up in a working-class family and in that kind of area, so I very much feel that's something I very much understand and feel deeply connected to. So I don't have any judgment of anybody. I don't have that in my bones. So I think that's just going to come out in what I do. I don't have any sort of — I don't need to do anything because that's just how I feel.
But I think like that about everybody. I think we should all respect and be kind and caring towards each other. I feel the world doesn't — I feel like that about everybody. I try not to judge anyone when I first meet anyone, or to judge anything or anybody. I try not to. I guess, of course, we probably all do on some level, but I try not to. And I just don't have that in my bones, so it's not going to be there in the film, I don't think.
I don't think I'm making political — it's not a political gesture, not really. It's more about the people, I think. And it's more about trying to show people in three-dimensional ways. It's a privilege for someone like me who comes from that working-class background to be a filmmaker. What a privilege. What an amazing place I'm in that I've come from a working-class background, but here I am making films — what an amazing thing that is.
And to me, I see that as quite a responsibility. And it's almost I feel like I need to really try to present it — I mean, obviously I'm making a film from my point of view, and that I'm not trying to make a wide political gesture, I'm just trying to make one from my point of view, in a way I understand, and that's all I try to do.
I don't try to pretend I know everything, or I have great, sweeping view — obviously I wish the world was a more equal, fairer place for people. And there's plenty of wealth in the world to go around, isn't there? I'd like it that people weren't struggling to eat or to have somewhere to live.
Originally in the film, I put the family — because of lockdown here and COVID, nobody went to work, and London at the moment has masses and masses of buildings, it has sprouted up like some sort of Blade Runner futuristic thing. And all the people that didn't go to their offices every day didn't want to go back into the offices. And I thought 'oh, there's all of these empty buildings now, all of these big office blocks, empty — why don't put all of the people that don't have homes there?
There's so many people without homes. The homeless situation, it seems to be getting worse in every single country. When I go to America, they say the homeless thing is incredibly awful there. There are tent cities, and there are avenues and streets full of people living in tents and cars. I'm thinking 'but you've got all these empty buildings. You've got all of these office blocks that no one's working in. Why don't we just put everybody in there?'.
So originally in the film, I put the family them in there. But we couldn't find a building like that to film in, so we didn't end up filming there. But the intention was there. My heart was there.
So there's all these little things that I do care about that I put in the film, but I wouldn't say it's a big, sweeping political gesture. It's more about the people, more about trying to tell a small world in a way that I see as being true, as true to me. It's my truth — I'm not saying it's everyone's truth or a universal truth, it's just a truthful thing for me.
There's things I care about in the film always. Everything I care about. But I would say I'm not trying to make a massive statement."
Bird opened in cinemas Down Under on Thursday, February 20, 2025.
Images: Robbie Ryan / Atsushi Nishijima.